I thought this post an important one to be made – particularly in light of the fact that I’ve noticed it’s truth as blatantly as ever in the last few months…
What I’m talking about is the inconsistency of keyword search data results as displayed in Wordtracker – both the free version and paid.
I had just found another niche I wanted to begin testing for my IISFS experiment.
I setup some Adwords ads on keywords that supposedly had 200 searches per day – some of them 300 and some of them over 400.
I put up my ad and for a whole week I couldn’t manage a click – and not just a click, I could hardly manage an impression!
The terms just weren’t getting searched that much, period.
Now I’m the first to admit that I don’t know enough about the intricacies of how keyword search data is obtained to be able to speculate on reasons for the inconsistency. What I do know however is that the reason is irrelevant.
Further to that, the thing to take away from this revelation is to NEVER enter a niche without having run some Adwords traffic to your chosen keywords first.
When you’re looking for most of your traffic to come from Google, you have to be CERTAIN that the search volume really does exist – and the only way to do that (quickly) is with a real, live Adwords campaign.
I recently had someone from my forum report:
“Last week, when searching for product names, I found a few with a decent number of searches per month.
This week, when I put in those same product names, Wordtracker returned 0 results.
So I tried a few days later on the same product names, and again, no results.
I tested it again today at different times of the day. Sometimes results would show, and sometimes it would look like there were no searches.
One product had 62 searches per day, but 2 hours later, that same product showed 0 searches”
At least now you can all be totally clear that this does happen, and you can take the advice and avoid the dreaded situation of building a site and finding out months later that the market you thought existed has vanished into thin air
Good luck.
Post to Facebook
Share on Twitter
Digg This Article
Save on del.icio.us
I had a similar experience with this keyword tool. It gave me a reading of some 500 daily searches but is that reflected in the clicks on my ads? …Nope!
http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/
That is exactly why I only follow the Adwords technique and the free adwords keyword tool for my kw research… works well for me most of the time
i hate wordtracker… figures are too unreliable..
good post… glad to know am not alone in this situation…
That’s really discouraging news. I’ve invested in a different keyword tracker but I’m sure that they use the same source to determine the monthly search amount.
Thanks for reporting the results. This only enforces what I’ve heard from others about using Adwords…it’s the most reliable way to determine which keywords actually work. I still think, however, that these keyword tools are good to help you think of keywords you would like to use.
Sorry to post a “me too” but I’ve seen exactly the same phenomenon in some of my research. It seems to be a particular problem with geographically based research: “indiana car insurance”, “dallas plastic surgeon” etc.
In the link by my name I linked to some keyword research numbers I wrote about on my blog; there are one or two follow-up articles elsewhere on the blog too.
In a nutshell … for the last couplpe of months I have had the #1 spot in the Google SERPs for a phrase that WordTracker claims should see 144 searches a day. I have yet to see an AdSense click from that site.
Andrew, I think you’re 100% correct in your assessment.
Ok another ‘me too’ post here
,
Faced this several times infact. I usually search of niches in the first week of month and try to implement over them over them month. But when I come back next month keywords numbers change [well not always but most of the time].
I too love adwords keword tool but I miss numbers in there. As andrew said in some IISFS post we all love numbers
, Is there any reliable tool for keyword research which gives results with numbers.